Design leadership definitions, diversity & inclusion, and designing the hiring process. Book Review: Liftoff! (Part 2)
In this article, I will reflect on the first three chapters of the book “Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You”. If you’re looking for a shorter and condensed review you can check out my TL;DR review. Are you interested in getting the book? Buy it via Rosenfeld Media’s website.
Chapter 1: Surprise! You’re in charge of people now!
This chapter gives a good introduction to so many of us who were thrown into leading teams after getting promoted. Chris and Russ come up with a much-needed definition for what it means to be a manager and a leader. I particularly liked their short and concise way of describing that managers need direct reports and leaders need followers. Simple, right? I disagree. These days I’ve read countless articles claiming how we’re all leaders, but that’s obviously not true. If nobody follows you, then you aren’t a leader, so I found this distinction to be quite important and relevant. You can also not call yourself a manager, if you’re not actually managing a team. All of these “Marketing Manager”, “Product Manager” and “X Manager” titles don’t make this discussion any easier though I must admit.
I’ve often seen other folks trying to discredit managers as old and authoritarian figures while leaders are the new and modern way of leading people too. Some people I’ve met actually cringe when they hear “managing people” and immediately think of all the bad bosses and instances of micro-management they have experienced (even when it obviously wasn’t micro-management). I appreciated the authors’ mature look on these terms and thought the chapter served as an absolutely solid introduction for the entire book.
Chapter 2: Designing Diversity and Inclusion in your teams
I had a lot of hopes and expectations for the second chapter of the book. “Designing Diversity and Inclusion in your teams” immediately caught my eye when I got my hands on it. I remember that diverse teams always made sense to me in theory and practice. Still, I’m the kind of person who always appreciates a good amount of evidence and data to support business and management theory. McKinsey have certainly been at the forefront of sharing their insights on the topic. Why diversity matters and Delivering through diversity are popular reading materials and so is their newest article named Diversity wins: How inclusion matters.
Unfortunately, this was the first chapter of the book which was somewhat disappointing. I found the rationale and background of why diversity and inclusion matters quite basic. For such an important topic, I’d expect the authors to cover a lot more ground and also tackle a lot of the objections from companies and individuals who have the classic “we’re trying, but we can’t find anybody!” attitude. The limited guidance offered in this decently long chapter was obviously targeted at a US audience. Living in Austria, I was struggling to understand how the goals and measures should be adapted. I’m sure it’s the same for many folks reading this that are living in Asian, African, or European countries. Namely, the suggested portals for specifically reaching people of color or women in tech sounded useful, but either don’t exist here or are extremely small.
Most of the guidance on creating and sustaining an inclusive team was very underwhelming and shallow. Points of advice such as “Collaborate within and across teams” or “Resolve conflicts directly and without personal attacks” are simply good leadership skills in general and they’re also not very helpful if not specified more deeply. Whenever I read something like this I just ask myself “Okay, but how am I going to be able to do that?”.
I expected a solid primer on Diversity and Inclusion, but I can’t say that I found what I was looking for. I definitely would recommend all the McKinsey resources listed above over this chapter and didn’t feel that it taught me a lot at all.
Chapter 3: Designing your hiring process
Hiring is the most important strategic objective for any manager. How are you supposed to deliver the best results when you don’t even have the right skills to handle the work that your team is supposed to be doing? Sure, training and coaching is another key skill, but building effective teams starts with hiring.
Chris and Russ deeply understand the importance of hiring, screening, interviewing, negotiating, and more. The third chapter of “Liftoff!” starts with a great list of thoughts on how to design an effective hiring process. There is a thought-provoking list of questions (page 37) which does a terrific job of conveying just how much work can be put into designing a hiring experience for your candidates. From everything I read every week about hiring and interviewing (e.g. on Rands Leadership Slack) I sincerely doubt that anybody has truly perfected this though.
A fill-in-the-blank template about defining a hiring experience vision is also included in this chapter. This part didn’t resonate with me as strongly as it reminded me of various “cookie-cutter templates” that can easily be used without being understood. Simon Wardley mentioned a “company vision builder” in his talks and while amusing, they frequently don’t actually solve anything when the involved people don’t understand the background and purpose of this exercise deeply. We haven’t even started talking about “the data” or lack of it here btw. ;-)
The authors recommend that new hires should be surveyed on their experience to kick-start an ongoing improvement effort. While the actual questions follow survey best-practices, I honestly doubt that most organizations are able to get honest feedback so early after a new person has been hired. Just recently I was participating in a discussion among various leaders in a Slack group where almost everybody voiced that they would never candidly share their feedback after an interview with a recruiter, even if they got the job.
Finally, there is a part about hiring in regard to diversity and inclusion which got me thinking deeper. I can’t remember where, but I’ve heard that diverse teams shouldn’t be diverse in values, but in backgrounds. The authors seem to try to make this distinction in the section about culture fit, but I feel that they don’t go far enough to explain it. For instance, the political situation in the US is so strained that I’m absolutely confident that political views on the opposite ends of the spectrum will not make for a more healthy and diverse team in all cases. How far would you go to have truly diverse teams in globally operating companies? At some point, we have to ask ourselves where a diversity of values occurs which can absolutely destroy teams in a very short amount of time. I’ve found Stanford’s “How to start a startup” lecture about culture really useful on this topic. When hiring you want to have a diverse group of people and backgrounds who share the same values (e.g. openly discussing problems / having a can-do attitude towards supporting others).
There are a lot more things to be said, but I’ll leave it at that for now. Thanks for reading and sharing any thoughts or resources you might have on these topics. :)
This article is part of a series, where I review the book “Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You” in detail:
- TL;DR review
- Chapters 1–3: Design leadership definitions, diversity & inclusion, and designing the hiring process
- Chapters 4–7: Hiring designers from job descriptions, to screening, interviewing, and onboarding
- Chapters 8–10: Team Charters, One-on-Ones, and Design Critiques
- Chapters 11–13: Presenting work, saying no, and growing your designers
- Chapters 14–16: Scaling design, influencing your organization, and escaping velocity
- BONUS: Collection of books, articles, and other resources for leading design teams.
